The nvidia-prime 0.5 package landed today for Ubuntu 14.04 in the long-standing effort to improve NVIDIA Optimus laptop support under Linux for systems with both Intel and NVIDIA graphics processors.

The nvidia-prime 0.5 release improves hardware detection, better deals with X.Org Server configuration files, and adds a prime-select switcher for switching between the integrated and discrete GPUs. This work also allows disabling the discrete GPU for power conservation. The nvidia-prime 0.5 package is used in conjunction with the NVIDIA R319 Linux graphics driver release or newer.

Details on nvidia-prime 0.5 that is available for Ubuntu 14.04 development work (and not Ubuntu 13.10) can be found via Launchpad.net. The update is currently in trusty-proposed.

An X.Org Server 1.15 development release has also been pulled into the Ubuntu 14.04 archive that includes upstream fixes for Optimus/PRIME handling and other fixes.

Stay tuned for my extensive NVIDIA Optimus laptop benchmarks under Linux using Ubuntu on the ASUS Zenbook Prime and it does include Windows 8.1 reference results.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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